


Déjà Voodoo

by lustmordred



Category: Lost Souls - Poppy Z. Brite
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-07
Updated: 2011-12-07
Packaged: 2017-10-27 01:00:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/289838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lustmordred/pseuds/lustmordred
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A seedy motel by the railroad tracks, goose-bumps and a radio with only one working station that plays 50’s rock n’ roll.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Déjà Voodoo

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on LJ community smallfandomfest. Title from the song of the same name by the Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band. It's been a while since I've read the books, any mistakes I attribute to that.

The bar where they played all night was called the Déjà Voodoo. Like the song, Ghost said, but Steve didn’t know that song. Ghost took the guitar from him and played some of it and the guitar was out of tune, but nobody really cared. It was just that kind of bar and Steve was the only one really paying attention.

“Fucking thing needs to be tuned. Here, give it,” Steve said, reaching for it.

Ghost smiled and played it anyway, though Steve scowled at him all the way to the end. He knew all the chords but he couldn’t remember all the words, so when he forgot them he made up new ones. No one seemed to care. When he was done, he gave the guitar back to Steve and Steve tuned it, but Ghost liked it better before.

They played all night until one o’clock when everyone, seemingly by mutual, unspoken agreement, went home. There was a hundred and five dollars in the guitar case at the edge of the little stage when they were done, over half of it in ones and quarters. One particularly generous drunk tourist type had left them a twenty. Another one had left them a handful of wrapped ginger candy.

At a convenience store off Bourbon Street, Steve bought a bottle of Night Train. At a tourist trap pocket in the wall, Ghost bought a floppy fedora hat from a fat man wearing love beads. They walked down the side streets to get away from the smell of the gutters and in the dark when no one was looking, Ghost took Steve’s hand and Steve let him.

“You cut your finger,” he said, tracing the mark on the tip of Steve’s forefinger. “On a guitar string.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. He gently squeezed Ghost’s hand to make him stop touching it.

It was a hot night. The air was thick and wet, a metallic tang to it coming off the lake. It smelled like rot, like leaves decomposing in the dark. Just walking in air like that made them sweat right through their clothes. It made the cobblestones gleam with a dull crockery shine like they did after a hard rain. The smell of Bourbon Street was made thicker with water and it lingered even where they were, a smell of piss and vomit and booze mixed together and left out in the southern summer sun.

The land was like the ravaged body of a party girl that way. The city, too, she was a call girl. She was a hell of good time, but her veins were full of garbage and poison and no matter how much water fell on her, she would never come truly clean. Oh, but she was beautiful. Especially at a distance. It was only when you got really close that you noticed the scars and tracks and cellulite under the polish. If you could go on loving her for her faults and her decay when the lights were out or after the sun came up, then you knew you were home.

They took an alley to cut over to the next street and Steve stopped by a big green dumpster to twist off the top of his wine and take a drink. He was carrying his guitar in a case by a strap over his shoulder and cursed when he thumped it against the metal side of the dumpster. He shifted to make himself look comfortable and it seemed casual enough, then he offered Ghost the bottle.

Ghost took it and caught a whiff of something a little bit like Kool-Aid and a little bit like Clorox. He took a drink and it tasted sweet and full of vinegar, the way homemade wine tastes when it goes bad before it ages. It was how he liked wine best and he took a long drink before he gave the bottle back to Steve.

“Need to find us a place to crash tonight,” Steve said. “Maybe a motel. We’ve still got some cash.”

Ghost was peeling the wrapper off a piece of candy. “Sure.”

“There’s one on the next street I think,” Steve said.

“I think they charge by the hour,” Ghost said.

Steve curled his lip at that. “It’s optional.”

Ghost smiled and didn’t reply, just gazed down the alley to the sidewalk where people passed by every few minutes and had no idea that he was standing there in the dark. That Steve was standing there with him. If they had known, they would not have cared.

Steve was the only one who cared about things like that, but he was caring less and less every day.

Steve had another drink and then another before putting the cap back on the Night Train and standing away from the dumpster. They went down the alley and the motel they remembered was still there, but it was two streets over instead of one and one of the letters on the sign had burned out so that the blue florescent lights welcomed them to the Blue Moon Mo_el. Where there were always a few vacancies.

Ghost hummed “Hotel California” under his breath as they crossed the parking lot to the office. He didn’t realize he was doing it until Steve looked at him with his eyebrows raised like he was waiting for something.

Ghost stopped humming. “Sorry.”

“‘You can check out but you can never leave.’ Not real reassuring, Ghost. Try a happy thought,” Steve said.

He was teasing just a little and Ghost smiled at him, acknowledging the effort. “It’s not _un_ happy,” he said. “There are worse places to be.”

“Yeah?” Steve said. “Let me get us a room first before you decide that.”

“Okay, Steve,” Ghost said.

When Steve started to go inside to the desk, Ghost didn’t move to follow him. He stood at the curb staring up at the sky and used his tongue to roll the hard candy in his mouth to the other cheek. Steve caught himself watching him, snorted a soft cough of laughter at himself, and went back to where he was standing to give him the bottle of Night Train.

“Hold this for me,” he said.

“Sure,“ Ghost said, taking the paper wrapped bottle from him. His voice was soft and a little far away, like he was hearing other voices somewhere in the distance.

“You can drink it if you want to,” Steve said. “Just don’t drink it all.” He ran his hand through Ghost’s silver blonde hair, upsetting the hat on his head so that it fell over one eye at a cockeyed angle. Then he hefted the weight of his guitar on his shoulder a little higher and went inside the office.

Ghost stared up at the sliver of moon he could make out through the filter of the nighttime city lights. He could even see faint specks of some of the brightest stars if he squinted. From somewhere close, the sulfuric wet wood and magazine paper smell of a hobo fire reached him and his nostrils flared once as he breathed it in. In the corner of his eye, he watched the movement of Steve in the office, Steve and the lady behind the counter as he signed something and she got him a key. The smoky air slid over his skin, bringing with it the chill of death, the ever-present _presence_ of Ann where she lingered just beyond his sight.

He lowered his head and looked around. Across the parking lot, a mangy dog, the kind called a Catahoula Cur or a Leopard Dog, watched him with its strange almost white blue eyes. It had one ear and when it noticed Ghost looking at it, its tail thumped on the asphalt.

It wasn’t that bad a place. At least not on the outside.

“Lady says no TV, but we got a radio,” Steve said when he came out, flipping a key with an orange key ring on his finger. “She says it’s clean. We’re on the end there.”

“There’s a railroad in the back,” Ghost said as they went to the room and Steve unlocked the door.

“How do you know that?” Steve asked.

Ghost shrugged. “Go look if you don’t believe me.”

Steve didn’t go look. He believed him. He’d known Ghost long enough, he’d believe a lot of crazy shit, a lot crazier than the possibility there was really a railroad behind the motel and that Ghost could know that without looking or ever hearing a train pass. It was the dreams that were the worst. The most vivid visions always came to him in his dreams.

“In the 50’s, this is where they loaded cattle into cars to take them to the slaughter houses,” Ghost said. He closed the door after them and engaged the locks.

“Yeah?” Steve said. He sat on the side of the bed and bounced once experimentally.

“Steve,” Ghost said, looking around and then looking down at him on the bed. “There’s one bed.”

“It was cheaper,” Steve said. He said it simply, but he was looking at the worn carpet between his feet instead of at Ghost.

Ghost frowned thoughtfully, then just went by him toward the bathroom in the back. “I call first shower,” he said.

Steve let him have it.

The room was small and almost perfectly square. It had a broken air conditioner and a big window in the front that looked out on the parking lot. After fiddling with the air conditioner long enough to become convinced that it was truly broken, Steve opened the window. The air outside wasn’t much cooler than the stifling air inside, but there was a bit of a breeze. The radio was old and looked badly used. He turned it on and found that it only got one station out of Metairie that played nothing but 50’s rock and roll.

Ghost was still in the shower, but he’d left the bottle of Night Train on the chipped dresser for him and Steve picked it up and took a long gulp. He belched and rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth, then took it with him and went to see if there was a vending machine he could get snacks from.

Neither of them had eaten anything since lunch around one when they split a shrimp po’ boy at a place over on Chartres Street. It was really late… or really damn early depending on how you looked at it. The sun would be up in a few hours and it was closer to breakfast than supper time, but Ghost and Steve were mostly night people and would probably sleep through the hottest part of the day. Anything at all really would do them, even those weird new Cheetos with the bright green specks that tasted alright until you got down to the bottom and they got so hot, you could peel the skin off the roof of your mouth after you swallowed. Even Tic-Tacs. Steve wasn’t all that picky about it and, more than anything, only cared because he thought Ghost should eat something.

There was a vending machine against the building by the office between a paper box dispensing outdated issues of the Times Picayune and an ice machine that was empty except for a puddle of dirty water and a few mummified love bugs. Steve bought two bags of Zappo’s Crawtator chips and two bags of mini Chips Ahoy! cookies. He took it all back to the room and dumped it on the bed next to Ghost, who was painting his fingernails with blue nail polish from a bottle he’d found on the counter in the bathroom.

“This stuff’s going to taste like shit with Night Train, but I thought we should eat,” Steve said. He sat on the side of the bed and opened a bag of chips.

Ghost finished painting the nails on his left hand and took a chip from Steve’s bag. “Almost everything tastes like shit with Night Train,” he said and ate it.

On the radio, the Platters were singing “The Great Pretender” and Ghost hummed along to the song as he ate a few more chips and went back to painting the nails on his other hand.

The song switched to something by Little Richard and Steve opened one of the bags of cookies. With the polish on his nails still drying, Ghost couldn’t put his hand inside the bag, so Steve held it for him and he ate it from his hand. His tongue caught the tip of Steve’s cut forefinger when he ate it and Steve surprised him a little when he put his finger in his mouth after, sucking away crumbs and Ghost’s saliva.

When Ghost finished painting his nails, Steve turned off the overhead light and Ghost turned on the lamp on the wall by the bed and they sat with their backs to the headboard and the bags of chips and cookies between them, eating and passing the bottle of Night Train until the wine was gone. Steve had a little pot in a small Ziploc baggie and a pack of TOP rolling papers in his pocket. He fished them out, rolled a joint and they smoked it. The marijuana tasted sweetly like what hot tar smells like on the road in the hot sun. It tasted like honeysuckle rotting in the swampy wastelands right there on the vine. Ghost sat with his head tilted back against the headboard and ran his tongue over the back of his teeth, and his mind drifted.

It went to Ann, then it passed her by. Ann was always there and she was always angry. But other than her, older than her, there were more. There was a woman in white with dark skin like mahogany and eyes the soot grey of a gull’s wing crying into her hands, full of blood, her wrists cut open right down the center, tendons gleaming and the salt of her tears washing them white. There was a boy in eyeliner and glitter makeup with the back of his head caved in. It happened in the bathroom, skull cracking like a chicken’s egg against the spout in the bathtub.

“Ghost,” Steve said.

Ghost blinked at him and he got the impression from the way Steve said his name that it wasn’t the first time. “What?”

“What’s wrong?” Steve asked.

“Nothing. It’s just… so many people have been in this room,” Ghost said.

“Well, it’s a motel room,” Steve said.

“Ann,” Ghost said softly.

Steve gave him a sharp look. “She wasn’t here.”

“She’s here now,” Ghost said. He let out a deep breath and closed his eyes for a minute.

“She’s dead,” Steve said, his voice hard. “Ann’s dead.”

“I know,” Ghost said.

They had killed her, after all.

“Shut up about it, then,” Steve said.

Ghost blinked and stared up at the ceiling. There were water stains up there, the plaster was cracking and sagging. It was brown in places like old bloodstains. “You haven’t taken a shower yet,” Ghost said.

“I’m going to do that right now,” Steve said, grabbing at the excuse to get out of there and close himself alone in the bathroom for a little while.

He left Ghost on the bed staring _through_ the ceiling and went to wash up.

Steve didn’t usually mind the visions. He liked Ghost. Liked him a lot. More than a lot, sometimes. Most of the time, really, if he were being honest. Ghost was everything, he was just _everything_ to Steve, but the bad business with Ann had really fucked him up bad for a while. All of it, but the way she died, that had been the worst. It was after Ann that Steve didn’t trust himself with women anymore. They were fragile, they could break so easy. For a while, he had thought of Ghost like that and it made him a little paranoid. Ghost wasn’t fragile at all, but he looked like it would take almost nothing to snap him into pieces and Steve didn’t know what he’d do if that happened.

Now Ghost, talking about Ann, just like she was standing right there and Steve just wasn’t looking hard enough, that was something that could drive him fucking insane if he let it. How it hadn’t already done that to Ghost was a real mystery. Unless he considered the possibility that it already had.

The radio was playing “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins when Steve left the bathroom and Ghost was laying on his side, facing away from him toward the window. He had painted another coat of blue polish on his nails and the acetone scent of it was thick in the room. The breeze through the window brought the smell of sweet olive and citrus from somewhere to mingle with it and the combination was almost sickening.

Steve got on the bed and stretched out, thinking Ghost was asleep or even if he wasn’t, wanted to be left alone. He closed his eyes and was just starting to drift when Ghost spoke and made him jump.

“There was a girl. Abigail. They all called her Abbey and she hated it. She was pregnant and she never told anyone, not even her boyfriend because it wasn’t his. Someone else. Her brother,” Ghost said. He spoke in a hushed way, but there were tears in his voice anyway. He was weeping for the dead. “It was an accident. Heroin, but that wasn’t all. Heroin cut with strychnine. Too much of it.”

Steve rolled over and put his hand on Ghost’s shoulder. He squeezed once gently, to comfort. Ghost was grieving for a girl he had never known. An unborn child that could have died fifty or more years before either of them were born. There probably wasn’t another soul in the world that even remembered who they had been, but Ghost, he remembered it for them all and it always broke his heart wide open.

Ghost turned to Steve on the bed and his face was wet with tears, his pale eyelashes clumped together from crying and his face slightly pink with it. He reached out for him and Steve pulled him into his arms, shushing him. Then Ghost kissed him and Steve was still new enough to that, he froze and caught his breath. Ghost noticed it, but he didn’t care. He pressed his tongue to the seam of Steve’s lips and opened his mouth, coaxing Steve to open his. He did and when he licked inside, he tasted spicy sweet ginger candy in Ghost’s mouth with the salt of his tears, on the back of his teeth and the roof of his mouth, a light residual musk flavor of marijuana.

The radio played “Sea of Love” as Steve rose up on the bed over Ghost and Ghost rolled onto his back beneath him. Somewhere, not too far away, the deep, lonely lowing whistle of a train sounded and the wheels clacked and clicked on the rails as Steve and Ghost’s fingers laced together, smearing tacky, half-dry blue nail polish between their fingers. Steve held him down and they left blue streaks on the stained sheets when Steve thrust into him and they began to move.

They were fresh from the shower and their skin was still moist, but water from the air gathered on their bodies like condensation on cool glass. As they rolled over the bed and Ghost arched his back under Steve’s hands, water that was only half sweat slid down his spine over Steve’s fingers and soaked Steve’s dark hair to a glossy shine. It pooled on their skin and was salty in their mouths. The warm, soft wind through the window made them both shiver and their skin pebble with goose-bumps and some of it wasn’t wind at all. Ghost would never speak of it, but some of that was Ann, screaming her hatred across the veil. Some of it wasn’t even that. It was the wail of a hundred sorrowful voices belonging to a hundred long ago people who had fucked on that same bed before them. But some of it, most of it, was just the wind.

Steve stared into Ghost’s eyes and Ghost stared back at him without shame, without keeping anything at all for himself. Perhaps Steve couldn’t see everything, or even more than was normal the way Ghost saw things, but it was there for him. The dim lights of a thousand paper lanterns, of every star over their head that rose before morning and the sway of the long wild grass somewhere far away between where they were now and Missing Mile where they were going. The spirits in Ghost’s mind dissolved right there as Steve watched him, their connection severed by the smell of him, like tobacco, marijuana and bad bum wine, by the taste of him and the weight of him and the pleasurable ache of him moving in and out of Ghost’s body.

Ghost snatched for that with his paint-smeared fingers in Steve’s callused hands, with his candy sweet tongue in Steve’s bitter mouth, with his lithe, pale body wrapped around him so tightly that nothing else could ever get through and touch him if Ghost refused to let it. Everything else was gone, even Ann and her hatred and her memory, all gone. Ghost took it all and turned it away. Steve always needed to feel like the stronger one, and he _was_ strong. Steve wasn’t always a good person and he would never understand and never believe how much he was protected by Ghost, but most of the time, he was good enough.

Steve kissed him and it was deep and possessive and just a little bit shy. It was everything that it was and it was good enough.

The sun was coming up when they finally let each other go and crawled away like waterlogged drunkards to opposite sides of the bed to sleep. Steve stared down at the floor, at the toe of one of Ghost’s shoes, a white sneaker with purple magic marker drawings all over it. On the other side of the bed, on Ghost’s side, the radio was playing “Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley and it was like chewing on aluminum foil.

He picked up the shoe off the floor and pushed himself up enough to throw it at the radio. It hit and the radio made a sound like the indignant squawk of a chicken before it toppled off the table and crashed to the floor.

Steve slumped back on the bed with a satisfied grunt.

“Steve, you broke it,” Ghost said.

Steve blinked, then closed his eyes and said nothing.

“Steve?”

“What?”

“You broke the radio,” Ghost said. He sounded a little sad.

“It was already broken,” Steve muttered. “It only got the one fucking station.”

Ghost was quiet for a minute and Steve thought he was finally falling asleep. “But now it’s _really_ broken,” he said.

Steve groaned and turned his face into the pillow. He coughed at the stale smell of it and rolled over to throw it off the bed. “I’ll fix it later.”

“Okay,” Ghost said.

They went to sleep. Around ten A.M., Ghost rolled over and pressed his face into Steve’s chest, hiding from the phantoms in his dreams. A little while after that, Steve got up to close the curtains against the sun that had finally reached the mattress where they slept. It was five after one in the afternoon when Steve got the radio put back together and working again. He knew the time because the DJ had been in the process of cheerfully shouting it over the airwaves when the sound kicked back in.

Ghost was still sleeping later that afternoon when Steve picked up his guitar and sat at the chair by the open window to pick out the chords of a familiar song. He didn’t sing along, though he knew the words quite well by now. Singing was Ghost’s thing, and he wasn’t the best singer in the world, but he had that voice of his. Like sugar and whiskey and drops of melted gold picking up slivers of glass as they rolled down a rain gutter. But Steve knew the guitar and at least when he played it, it was well-tuned.

Ghost woke up to the sound of Steve playing his song, one he’d written what felt like a long time ago, though it hadn’t been that long at all. He’d written it before all the vampire mess, before Ann, before the poor little twins. They had been singing it together the last time they drove out to New Orleans and Steve had sang the words wrong, but Ghost didn’t care and he changed them for him. There were a lot of reasons why they could have stayed away from New Orleans and never gone back, but they didn’t. They liked it too much and they weren’t afraid of vampires anyway.

“We gotta go soon,” Steve said. He didn’t look up from his fingers on the guitar strings as he picked them, but he knew Ghost was awake.

Ghost smiled and rolled onto his back to stretch. “Okay.”

“It’s a pain in the ass to catch a ride out here when it gets dark,” Steve said.

“I know, Steve,” Ghost said. He got up from the bed and went into the bathroom to shower. People took a lot of showers in Louisiana in the summer. That or they just lived with being sticky all the time.

They bought sandwiches at a convenience store a few streets over from the motel and caught a ride with a couple of college kids in a pickup truck on Decatur Street who were going back over the causeway. They rode in the cab of the truck with a one-eared Catahoula Cur named Beau and Ghost sang along with the radio, which they could only just make out over the wind in their ears.

“Maybe we should drive next time,” Ghost said when they stopped at a truck stop for gas.

Steve gave the college guys ten bucks for gas and shrugged before he hopped back up into the cab. “Could,” he said.

“I guess this way’s cheaper,” Ghost said.

“Yeah and my car, she likes to break down and strand us in fucked up places,” Steve said.

Ghost petted Beau’s head and frowned thoughtfully. “I like those fucked up places,” he said.

Steve lit a cigarette, took a drag and offered it to Ghost. “Tell you what. We get home, I’ll drive us out to the most fucked up place I can think of and pull one of the fuses,” he said.

Ghost took the cigarette from him, took a drag, and passed it back as he exhaled little rings over Steve’s head. “It’s not the same,” he said, smiling.

Steve put his hand on the dog’s head with Ghost’s. The dog was so excited by the attention, he didn’t know who to lick first and in his jittering in place, Steve’s fingers and Ghost’s touched. They both looked at them, at the bright blue nail polish smeared on their fingertips, and held their breath for a moment.

“We’ll drive next time,” Steve finally said.

He took Ghost’s hand, but he had only given his fingers a light squeeze when the dog decided he liked Ghost best of all and tried to crawl into his lap. He was too big but he nearly fit anyway and Ghost fell back against the side of the truck laughing.

Inside the truck, that same station out of Metairie was playing the Mel Tormé cover of “Blue Moon.” A fat man was leaning against the ice box in front of the store, smoking a cigarette and watching them.

A few minutes later, the college boys came out. They had a six-pack and they didn’t offer to share it.

“So, where you guys going?” one of them asked. He was the one driving.

He had been talking to Steve, but Ghost answered him from where he was laying on his back after playing with the dog. “Nowhere,” he said. “We’re just going home.”

“Where’s that?”

“North Carolina,” Steve said.

The two boys exchanged a look over the roof of the truck. “You’re a long ass ways from home, then,” the passenger said.

“We can take you far as Bogalusa,” the driver said.

“We appreciate it,” Steve said.

They got in the truck and Steve wondered if they were really going to drink those beers in the truck. He decided they almost certainly were.

“We are,” Ghost said. At Steve’s questioning look, he smiled. “A long ass ways from home.”

Steve reached out and ran his hand through his hair. It was soft like cobwebs. “It’s not that far.”

 

✘✘✘


End file.
